What Exactly Is Imgur

Imgur History

With over 100 million users and counting, Imgur has quickly become the go to site for image hosting and sharing. Now before we go any further, I think its absolutely vital we get one thing out of the way.

For those of you who aren’t sure how to pronounce the sites name, it’s “imager”. Which makes perfect sense being that the site is all about uploading, sharing and hosting images.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s dive in and talk more about this really amazing image hosting site.

What Exactly Is Imgur ?

According to the Imgur.com website, Imgur is a visual storytelling community. Every single day millions of people visit the site to explore, share and discuss the many visual stories that have been uploaded. Currently there are more than 60 billion images being viewed on Imgur every month. It is now ranked as one of the top 100 sites in the United States, and one of the top 50 sites in the world.

The Story Behind Imgur

Imgur started off as nothing more than a side project. In 2009 Alan Schaaf was a computer science student at Ohio University. Frustrated with the very slow and often times laborious image hosting services that were available at the time, he decided he would set out to create his own. His whole objective was to create an image hosting service that didn’t suck.

He was tired of having to compress all of his images before he could upload them. He wanted a way to be able to do things such as crop, rotate and re-size his images. And that is how Imgur was born. It launched 6 years ago and has grown steadily every since. It is now the preferred image hosting site for millions of social media users on sites such as Twitter, Digg, and Reddit.

The great thing about Imgur is it provides users with a no limit platform. You can upload images however you want. And thanks to the homepage gallery, users now have the ability to refine their images based on the most popular and the most interesting. Images can be funny, inspiring, informative, or even cute.

You will even find stories about pop culture, current events, and personal transformations. So as you can see, Imgur is not like any of the other image hosting site out there. Images on this site tell a story that millions of people want to share.

Hosting images on the site is free for the user. Images can be uploaded in a variety of different formats, including the every so popular GIF, and are supported by ads. All images are kept online for free unless it hasn’t been viewed in the last six months. If that is the case the image will be deleted.

Besides uploading images, users can also post comments and create new images using the tools on the site. Those images can then be shared with other users as well as the wider internet.

So as you can see, Imgur has forever changed the way we share and explore images. To learn more visit them online at www.Imgur.com.